Robert Horton, Writing About Film

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About This Site

The Crop Duster has two goals. One is to organize links to my critical work: reviews written for The Herald (Everett, Washington) and Seattle Weekly; and public appearances and TV jobs. Selected past work for Film Comment and elsewhere is also linkified. You may also link to my website of 1980s reviews and learn more about my book on Frankenstein and my graphic novel, ROTTEN.

The second goal is to keep a daily record of films watched, annotated with brisk, brief comments. It's a slightly more advanced version of the movie list I kept, in Flair pen, thumbtacked next to my bed when I was twelve.

Pages

The Red House (Delmer Daves, 1947). Edward G. Robinson in gothic form, warning the young people not to go into the woods on his property – yet adopted daughter Allene Roberts (a strange presence) and teen handyman Lon McAllister keep poking around in there. The boy also has a sweetheart at school (the young – but not that young – Julie London), and brooding Rory Calhoun hangs around the woods, and Judith Anderson is Robinson’s stoic sister. You can see why this movie spooks people. Daves already has a fluid, almost conversational approach with the camera. The music’s by Miklós Rózsa, so enter the woods at your own peril.

Mine Own Executioner (Anthony Kimmins, 1947). Very odd tale about a psychologist (Burgess Meredith) applying psychoanalytic techniques to a war-traumatized, potentially violent patient (Kieron Moore). The movie’s quite serious about presenting therapy sessions, and about Meredith’s perpetual unhappiness, which has him torn between wife Dulcie Gray and possible mistress Christine Norden. The film is artily shot (no wonder Hitchcock hired cinematographer Wilkie Cooper a couple of years later), very talky, and Meredith makes for a watchably peculiar protagonist – he gives half his performance with his pipe – no stranger to Freud, he.

Jîn (Reha Erdem, 2013). From the Turkish director of Times and Winds, another lyrical study of childhood lost. This time the focus is a teenage Kurdish girl fighting in the mountains; the world of war and terror is contrasted with the world of animals and clouds and rocks. Hauntingly enhanced with music by Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Unforgiven (Sang-il Lee, 2013). A Japanese remake of the Clint Eastwood film, staying close in some ways to the original but also veering off in some intriguing ways (including an ending that creates an arguably more stirring resolution). Ken Watanabe plays the Eastwood role, with appropriate restraint – obviously, the “retired samurai” idea substitutes for former gunfighter. The cast is strong all around, with Koichi Sato a standout in the Gene Hackman part – although they don’t give his character anything like the retirement house Hackman is building, alas. Great sense of place, especially an opening sequence that “does snow” like few movies are able to do snow. Was this ever released in the U.S.?

Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug, 2018). It helps to have a leading lady who is just a tad more down-to-earth than Angelina Jolie, and Alicia Vikander is that. As action flicks go, the nonsense factor is high, but the enthusiasm for well-shot cliffhangers is admirable. (full review 3/16)

The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017). The funnies surrounding the aftermath of the leader’s demise, a full-on, quick-slashing satire that truly cuts. (full review 3/14)

Yield to the Night (J. Lee Thompson, 1956). British bombshell Diana Dors in a de-glamorized role as a death-row inmate recalling the events leading up to her crime. Surprisingly, the movie spends more time in prison than on the flashbacks, focusing on the cruel minutiae of waiting for a possible reprieve. Dors is quite good, as is Yvonne Mitchell as a sympathetic prison matron. Evocatively photographed by Gilbert Taylor, who would knock off Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, and Repulsion in the coming decade.

Submission. “Acting is a precise craft but also a mysterious alchemy, and when you’ve gotten as good as Tucci has, a seamless performance like this can transform a so-so movie into a pleasure.” (Herald link here.)

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992). Well, there’s a good reason this is remembered as one of the better Best Picture Oscar winners. Eastwood conveys a strong sense of the film’s place in the mythology of the west, some of that contained through pure imagery – the early scene when Will Munny looks out at the horizon and sees the Schofield kid as a tiny image on the horizon, riding away, and you get that sense that Munny’s going to join him not so much for the money or the justice but for the need to be out there riding on the edge of the land.

Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017). An Australian Western, about an ill-treated aboriginal man (Hamilton Morris) on the run with his wife after a fatal encounter among the “whitefellas.” Very solid supporting work from Sam Neill and Bryan Brown, lending their iconic status in Down Under cinema, and lyrical moments combined with stunning landscapes. An intense movie – you feel it always knows exactly what it’s doing, even if there are no great surprises – and while it’s no Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, it achieves its purpose.

Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018). Decent spy-movie doings, Jennifer Lawrence well cast (except as a ballerina in the early going, but we can accept that as a movie thing), and a handful of extremely welcome espionage players, including Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, and Charlotte Rampling. When Rampling, as the headmistress of a school where recruits are taught to seduce and sleep with targets, declares she prefers to be called “Matron,” your knees get a little shaky. Main problem is F. Lawrence is a designer more than a director, and the unseemly focus of this particular kind of spying can’t help but make the movie-watching experience pretty unseemly itself. (full review here.)

A Gunman Has Escaped (Richard M. Grey, 1948). British B-crime, very cheaply done, with robbery ringleader and incidental murderer John Harvey going on the lam with his skeptical collaborators. They end up doing chores on a farm, a peculiar choice of hide-out, and one of the robbers falls for the farmer’s daughter. Script by John Gilling; a pretty nonsensical plotline, but with quite a bit of violence.